1. Title, director and release year? The Story of Stuff/The Story of Bottled Water/The Story of Cap and Trade, Annie Leonard, 2007 2. What is the central argument or narrative of the film? The Story of Stuff focuses on the life cycle for consumer products and the materials economy of our products. The film exemplifies that a finite amount of resources on a linear system is not sustainable and that people need to pay more attention to what goes into the manufacturing of our possessions as well as how they are used once we are done with them. In general, the film tells people that they need to reduce their consumption. The Story of Bottled Water shows people the misconceptions surround the bottled water industry. The main point is that bottled water is not only completely unnecessary, it also harms the environment. Most tap water is cleaner than bottled water but because of advertising campaigns, people are led to believe otherwise. It calls for people to end the use of bottled water. The Story of Cap and Trade reveals the “devils in the details” when looking into cap and trade agreements. It supports the idea of a cap but not by the methods suggested by Enron and Goldman Sachs. It promotes that the money made from selling carbon permits should be used to improve air quality as opposed to going to companies for profit. 3. What sustainability problems does the film draw out? There are many sustainability problems that are brought up in these films including the government, the economy, technology, media and information, behavior/culture, and the environment. The government plays a major role in these three issues. The main issue is that the government is not doing all that it can to make the world more sustainable. The United States government spends 50% of our taxes on the armed forces. It should represent the people but instead it is only focus on “sucking up” the large corporation that hold massive amounts of power. Governments allow corporations to take land form indigenous people because the claim is that locals have no claim if they do not “own” the land or if they do not buy the goods that are manufactured from these resources. For cap and trade, the government has begun looking into climate change. Their solution thus far has been emissions trading also known as cap and trade. Unfortunately, the plans for this have been constructed by Enron and Goldman Sachs, two corporation known for decreasing the world’s economy and quality of life. The main idea is to trade carbon pollution credits. We need to reduce our carbon emission to 350 parts per million which means that we must reduce our current emissions by 80%. The government does this by agreeing on yearly limit of carbon emissions and then handing out permits to various corporations. For companies that are having a hard time reducing their carbon footprint, they can buy some other company’s permits that is not using them. The philosophy is that as long as we stay under the cap, it does not matter who innovates ways to reduce carbon emission and who does not. Finally, our government subsidizes fossil fuels twice as much as renewable energy. The problem presented by The Story of Stuff about our economy is that large corporations came up with the “consumer culture” after World War II to boost the economy. In today’s economy, corporations have externalized the cost of consumer products so that they do not capture the true price of manufacturing. This makes consumers more likely to purchase the products. It was also stated in the film that 30% of kids in Congo dropped out of school to mine the resources that go into our consumer goods. The products we buy are supporting the decrease in quality of life for children in third world countries. As for bottled water, it costs about 2,000 times more than tap water. This is completely ridiculous and obviously unnecessary. The media and the information the public is privy to is also a major sustainability problem. Many scientists and economists have been saying the cap and trade does not work in a real-world setting. The narrator claims that the financial scams also known as the “devils in the details” can be found all throughout the cap and trade agreement. First of all, there are such things as free permits in this agreement making it more of a “cap and giveaway” to major polluters. The more a company has polluted, the more permits a company gets. It is like rewarding them for polluting. As for offsetting, when a company reduces its carbon emissions, it can receive another permit that can be sold to a “polluter” who wants to emit more carbon. This does not work because it is hard to tell if carbon emissions are actually decreasing. This initiative also creates incentives to create false offsets. The European Union tried this already and found that carbon emissions actually went up as well as energy prices. Fake expansion plans can be construed by corporations to gain permits for carbon emissions. This creates a false sense of progress. Another major issue is the practice of manufactured demand which means that for the economy to grow, we must sell more and more stuff. Referring to the start of the bottled water craze, people were getting sick of drinking so much soda so corporations needed a solution for this issue. Their conclusion was to make consumers believe their tap water was not safe. They hid the reality of product which was that 1/3 of bottled water actually comes from the tap, like Dasani. They also say it is good for the environment when really it just promotes extraction and increased production. With all of the energy needed to make water bottles, 1 million cars could have been filled with fuel. Corporations’ tactics are “scaring, seducing, and misleading.” In The Story of Stuff it explains plainly that advertisements are made to make us feel bad about what we have when actually, our rate of happiness as a nation has decreased since the rise of consumerism. We are on a “work-watch-spend treadmill.” The media does a successful job of covering up the production cycle. As for technology, planned and perceived obsolescence are key. It initially caught on in the 1950s. Planned obsolescence is when products are made to stop working after a set amount of time so that the consumer is forced to buy the latest product. With perceived obsolescence, consumers are convinced that they must throw away things that are still perfectly working and useful solely by changing the aesthetics of a product so that it seems “cooler.” We have become a nation of consumers. After 9/11, instead of reflecting and remembering the people lost, our president called for us to go out and shop. About 1% of things we buy is still in use after 6 months. We each make about 4.5 pounds of waste a day. The environmental sustainability problems are the most shocking. Through extraction, we have used a majority of our resources and now they are running out. Approximately 1/3 of our natural resources are gone. In the United States alone, we have less than 4% of our original forests and 40% of our waterways are polluted to the point that they are not safe to use. In addition, 80% of all forests are now gone. We also produce more than our fair share of waste—making up about 30% of the world’s waste. When we do not have the resources we need, we take others. There are also approximately 100,000 chemicals in the products we buy and we do not even know the health risks for most of them. BFR is a neurotoxin that is used in just about everything including our pillows. These toxins then build up in the food chain and end up in human breast milk which gives babies the highest toxin doses of anyone. Factory workers also experience the highest level of exposure to these harmful chemicals. The erosion of the environment has created an endless supply of factory workers because they are no longer able to live in their rural communities and must move to the cities. In the United States, 4,000,000,000 pounds of toxic chemicals are produced per year. Sometimes companies move their factories overseas but the pollution just comes right back. Incineration releases toxins into the air. Dioxin is created by incineration and is one of the most deadly toxins. For bottled water, 80% of the bottles end up in landfills. Sometimes they are even sent to India. Plastic is actually down-cycled as opposed to recycled which means that is manufactured into lower quality products instead of products of the same quality. Ironically enough, a lot of water pollution comes from the plastic bottle industry. As for the climate change, it has been so drastic that the water levels will soon rise to cover some island communities and 9 out of 10 African farmers will not be able to farm anymore. 4. What parts of the film did you find most persuasive and compelling? Why? I found each of the films quite compelling. The narrator went through all of her points in a very organized manner and did not overwhelm me with information. Because of this, I gained a comprehensive understanding of each of these three issues. None of the films were more than twenty minutes, making it easy for people with even the shortest attention spans to pay attention. I really enjoyed the part of the Story of Stuff when the narrator talked about how the products we buy do not represent their actual cost. It gave me a greater appreciation for what I have and I will think twice before purchasing certain products and from certain places. 5. What parts of the film were you not compelled or convinced by? Some of the solution in the films for bottled water and “stuff” were very vague. I feel as if it would be hard to take action without being given more statistics as to how one might go about the suggested solutions. 6. What additional information does this film compel you to seek out? Where do you want to dig deeper and what connections do you want to make with other issues, factors, problems, etc.? I would like to learn more about the intricacies of cap and trade. I think it definitely has the potential to reduce our carbon emissions and that it can even be used for other sustainability issues as long as it is implemented correctly. I would also like to learn more about what kind of market research and campaigning went into the bottled water market and how they came up with the idea in the first place to sell people back their own water. 7. What audiences does the film best address? What kind of imagination is fostered in viewers? Do you think the film is likely to change the way viewers think about and act on environmental problems? I think these short films would be beneficial to students in middle school and above. The animations are engaging and the content presented in the film are not too in depth for younger students to have a hard time understanding what the issues are and how they can be solved. I think that students would definitely be compelled to take some kind of action, however big or small, after seeing these short films. At the end of each film, the narrator (Annie Leonard) always proposes a few simple, everyday solutions minimizing the problem. 8. What kinds of action or points of intervention are suggested by the film? For The Story of Stuff, the film called for people to recycle even though it only reduces the waste and does not solve the problem. We should also set out to save the forests, promote clean production, and take back the government so that it works for the people and not the corporations. Designers should also look into the cradle-to-cradle life cycle and closed loop production. It is also more sustainable to support local businesses. Our perceived need for consumer products was created by people so people can fix it. For The Story of Bottled Water, the film called for people to say no to bottled water and to join a campaign that works towards a real solution cleaning our tap water and getting rid of disposable bottled water. People could also lobby to bring back water fountains so that there is no need for bottled water. For the Story of Cap and Trade, the film calls for the government to sell carbon permits but make a clean energy economy with the profits. This money could also be given to citizens to make up for increased cost in energy when it rises to represent the true cost of our resources. The profits could also go towards paying back all of those families whose homes have been ruined due to our extraction and waste. The government should also reinstate the Clean Air Act so that it is not taken up by corporations to solve. Solid caps should also be determined to actually reduce our carbon footprint. Strong laws and citizen activism can also help this issue. Finally, carbon fees can be set up to help the environment. 9. What could have been added to this film to enhance its environmental educational value? The purpose of these films was just to give people a general overview of these sustainability issues. For this reason, the amount of depth the film went into the environmental impact of these issues was sufficient.
Links to the films:
The Story of Stuff <http://www.storyofstuff.com/>
The Story of Bottled Water <http://storyofstuff.org/bottledwater/>
The Story of Cap and Trade <http://www.storyofstuff.com/capandtrade/>
1. Title, director and release year?
The Story of Stuff/The Story of Bottled Water/The Story of Cap and Trade, Annie Leonard, 2007
2. What is the central argument or narrative of the film?
The Story of Stuff focuses on the life cycle for consumer products and the materials economy of our products. The film exemplifies that a finite amount of resources on a linear system is not sustainable and that people need to pay more attention to what goes into the manufacturing of our possessions as well as how they are used once we are done with them. In general, the film tells people that they need to reduce their consumption.
The Story of Bottled Water shows people the misconceptions surround the bottled water industry. The main point is that bottled water is not only completely unnecessary, it also harms the environment. Most tap water is cleaner than bottled water but because of advertising campaigns, people are led to believe otherwise. It calls for people to end the use of bottled water.
The Story of Cap and Trade reveals the “devils in the details” when looking into cap and trade agreements. It supports the idea of a cap but not by the methods suggested by Enron and Goldman Sachs. It promotes that the money made from selling carbon permits should be used to improve air quality as opposed to going to companies for profit.
3. What sustainability problems does the film draw out?
There are many sustainability problems that are brought up in these films including the government, the economy, technology, media and information, behavior/culture, and the environment. The government plays a major role in these three issues. The main issue is that the government is not doing all that it can to make the world more sustainable. The United States government spends 50% of our taxes on the armed forces. It should represent the people but instead it is only focus on “sucking up” the large corporation that hold massive amounts of power. Governments allow corporations to take land form indigenous people because the claim is that locals have no claim if they do not “own” the land or if they do not buy the goods that are manufactured from these resources. For cap and trade, the government has begun looking into climate change. Their solution thus far has been emissions trading also known as cap and trade. Unfortunately, the plans for this have been constructed by Enron and Goldman Sachs, two corporation known for decreasing the world’s economy and quality of life. The main idea is to trade carbon pollution credits. We need to reduce our carbon emission to 350 parts per million which means that we must reduce our current emissions by 80%. The government does this by agreeing on yearly limit of carbon emissions and then handing out permits to various corporations. For companies that are having a hard time reducing their carbon footprint, they can buy some other company’s permits that is not using them. The philosophy is that as long as we stay under the cap, it does not matter who innovates ways to reduce carbon emission and who does not. Finally, our government subsidizes fossil fuels twice as much as renewable energy.
The problem presented by The Story of Stuff about our economy is that large corporations came up with the “consumer culture” after World War II to boost the economy. In today’s economy, corporations have externalized the cost of consumer products so that they do not capture the true price of manufacturing. This makes consumers more likely to purchase the products. It was also stated in the film that 30% of kids in Congo dropped out of school to mine the resources that go into our consumer goods. The products we buy are supporting the decrease in quality of life for children in third world countries. As for bottled water, it costs about 2,000 times more than tap water. This is completely ridiculous and obviously unnecessary.
The media and the information the public is privy to is also a major sustainability problem. Many scientists and economists have been saying the cap and trade does not work in a real-world setting. The narrator claims that the financial scams also known as the “devils in the details” can be found all throughout the cap and trade agreement. First of all, there are such things as free permits in this agreement making it more of a “cap and giveaway” to major polluters. The more a company has polluted, the more permits a company gets. It is like rewarding them for polluting. As for offsetting, when a company reduces its carbon emissions, it can receive another permit that can be sold to a “polluter” who wants to emit more carbon. This does not work because it is hard to tell if carbon emissions are actually decreasing. This initiative also creates incentives to create false offsets. The European Union tried this already and found that carbon emissions actually went up as well as energy prices. Fake expansion plans can be construed by corporations to gain permits for carbon emissions. This creates a false sense of progress. Another major issue is the practice of manufactured demand which means that for the economy to grow, we must sell more and more stuff. Referring to the start of the bottled water craze, people were getting sick of drinking so much soda so corporations needed a solution for this issue. Their conclusion was to make consumers believe their tap water was not safe. They hid the reality of product which was that 1/3 of bottled water actually comes from the tap, like Dasani. They also say it is good for the environment when really it just promotes extraction and increased production. With all of the energy needed to make water bottles, 1 million cars could have been filled with fuel. Corporations’ tactics are “scaring, seducing, and misleading.” In The Story of Stuff it explains plainly that advertisements are made to make us feel bad about what we have when actually, our rate of happiness as a nation has decreased since the rise of consumerism. We are on a “work-watch-spend treadmill.” The media does a successful job of covering up the production cycle.
As for technology, planned and perceived obsolescence are key. It initially caught on in the 1950s. Planned obsolescence is when products are made to stop working after a set amount of time so that the consumer is forced to buy the latest product. With perceived obsolescence, consumers are convinced that they must throw away things that are still perfectly working and useful solely by changing the aesthetics of a product so that it seems “cooler.”
We have become a nation of consumers. After 9/11, instead of reflecting and remembering the people lost, our president called for us to go out and shop. About 1% of things we buy is still in use after 6 months. We each make about 4.5 pounds of waste a day.
The environmental sustainability problems are the most shocking. Through extraction, we have used a majority of our resources and now they are running out. Approximately 1/3 of our natural resources are gone. In the United States alone, we have less than 4% of our original forests and 40% of our waterways are polluted to the point that they are not safe to use. In addition, 80% of all forests are now gone. We also produce more than our fair share of waste—making up about 30% of the world’s waste. When we do not have the resources we need, we take others. There are also approximately 100,000 chemicals in the products we buy and we do not even know the health risks for most of them. BFR is a neurotoxin that is used in just about everything including our pillows. These toxins then build up in the food chain and end up in human breast milk which gives babies the highest toxin doses of anyone. Factory workers also experience the highest level of exposure to these harmful chemicals. The erosion of the environment has created an endless supply of factory workers because they are no longer able to live in their rural communities and must move to the cities. In the United States, 4,000,000,000 pounds of toxic chemicals are produced per year. Sometimes companies move their factories overseas but the pollution just comes right back. Incineration releases toxins into the air. Dioxin is created by incineration and is one of the most deadly toxins. For bottled water, 80% of the bottles end up in landfills. Sometimes they are even sent to India. Plastic is actually down-cycled as opposed to recycled which means that is manufactured into lower quality products instead of products of the same quality. Ironically enough, a lot of water pollution comes from the plastic bottle industry. As for the climate change, it has been so drastic that the water levels will soon rise to cover some island communities and 9 out of 10 African farmers will not be able to farm anymore.
4. What parts of the film did you find most persuasive and compelling? Why?
I found each of the films quite compelling. The narrator went through all of her points in a very organized manner and did not overwhelm me with information. Because of this, I gained a comprehensive understanding of each of these three issues. None of the films were more than twenty minutes, making it easy for people with even the shortest attention spans to pay attention. I really enjoyed the part of the Story of Stuff when the narrator talked about how the products we buy do not represent their actual cost. It gave me a greater appreciation for what I have and I will think twice before purchasing certain products and from certain places.
5. What parts of the film were you not compelled or convinced by?
Some of the solution in the films for bottled water and “stuff” were very vague. I feel as if it would be hard to take action without being given more statistics as to how one might go about the suggested solutions.
6. What additional information does this film compel you to seek out? Where do you want to dig deeper and what connections do you want to make with other issues, factors, problems, etc.?
I would like to learn more about the intricacies of cap and trade. I think it definitely has the potential to reduce our carbon emissions and that it can even be used for other sustainability issues as long as it is implemented correctly. I would also like to learn more about what kind of market research and campaigning went into the bottled water market and how they came up with the idea in the first place to sell people back their own water.
7. What audiences does the film best address? What kind of imagination is fostered in viewers? Do you think the film is likely to change the way viewers think about and act on environmental problems?
I think these short films would be beneficial to students in middle school and above. The animations are engaging and the content presented in the film are not too in depth for younger students to have a hard time understanding what the issues are and how they can be solved. I think that students would definitely be compelled to take some kind of action, however big or small, after seeing these short films. At the end of each film, the narrator (Annie Leonard) always proposes a few simple, everyday solutions minimizing the problem.
8. What kinds of action or points of intervention are suggested by the film?
For The Story of Stuff, the film called for people to recycle even though it only reduces the waste and does not solve the problem. We should also set out to save the forests, promote clean production, and take back the government so that it works for the people and not the corporations. Designers should also look into the cradle-to-cradle life cycle and closed loop production. It is also more sustainable to support local businesses. Our perceived need for consumer products was created by people so people can fix it.
For The Story of Bottled Water, the film called for people to say no to bottled water and to join a campaign that works towards a real solution cleaning our tap water and getting rid of disposable bottled water. People could also lobby to bring back water fountains so that there is no need for bottled water.
For the Story of Cap and Trade, the film calls for the government to sell carbon permits but make a clean energy economy with the profits. This money could also be given to citizens to make up for increased cost in energy when it rises to represent the true cost of our resources. The profits could also go towards paying back all of those families whose homes have been ruined due to our extraction and waste. The government should also reinstate the Clean Air Act so that it is not taken up by corporations to solve. Solid caps should also be determined to actually reduce our carbon footprint. Strong laws and citizen activism can also help this issue. Finally, carbon fees can be set up to help the environment.
9. What could have been added to this film to enhance its environmental educational value?
The purpose of these films was just to give people a general overview of these sustainability issues. For this reason, the amount of depth the film went into the environmental impact of these issues was sufficient.